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posted by mrpg on Friday April 19 2019, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the FSM dept.

It would seem from the research Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism that traumatic brain injury to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and/or dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs.

Religious beliefs are socially transmitted mental representations that may include supernatural or supernormal episodes that are assumed to be real. Religious beliefs, like other beliefs, are embedded in different ways in different people and societies (Cristofori & Grafman, in press).

One form of religious belief, religious fundamentalism, embodies adherence to a set of firm religious beliefs advocating unassailable truths about human existence (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992). According to the Baylor Religion Survey, a national survey study conducted with a nationally representative sample of 1721 respondents from the United States, 7.7% of all respondents reported being “Fundamentalist” as a part of their religious identity; 1.0% agreed that “Fundamentalist” was the one term that best described their religious identity (Bader, et al., 2006).

[...] Our study explores whether fundamentalism is modulated by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an important brain area involved in social event knowledge, abstractions and higher order social belief systems. Substantial evidence indicates that damage to the PFC can modify individuals’ belief systems (Forbes & Grafman, 2010; Krueger & Grafman, 2012). For instance, patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than matched controls (Cristofori, Viola, et al., 2015) and focal damage to the vmPFC resulted in greater religious fundamentalism, compared to healthy controls (Asp, Ramchandran, & Tranel, 2012). Thus, although a collection of cortical sectors function together to help shape and formulate beliefs, the PFC may be a critical hub for the representation of the diverse and abstract social beliefs that lie at the core of many religions.


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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 19 2019, @01:00PM (4 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Friday April 19 2019, @01:00PM (#832132)

    They upgraded his flux capacitor but forgot to upgrade the diodes. Bzzzztttt-POP!!!

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday April 19 2019, @04:24PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday April 19 2019, @04:24PM (#832194) Journal

    Fact is, my AI used to come up with much better English, then it learned too many real world comments.

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    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @09:22PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @09:22PM (#832302)

      Fact is, my AI used to come up with much better English, then it learned too many real world comments.

      And apparently doesn't have a sense of humor either.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:24AM

        by Bot (3902) on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:24AM (#832473) Journal

        no i dont lol

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        Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:09AM

      by RS3 (6367) on Saturday April 20 2019, @01:09AM (#832390)

      There is truth in what you say. I wrote here earlier how word and phrase definitions change, and individuals and subgroups adopt their own meanings, so that communication is confounded and ire increased. The Tower of Babel is being rebuilt.

      It's making me think, in my bio-limited way, that for example I have a spell-checker watching as I type, we could have another watcher that would flag and define any word or phrase that has some degree of misinterpretation or common misconception.